Rising late, I listen to loggers’ chainsaws from over the ridge to the west. The trees are almost at their peak of color. A distant crash.
Dave Bonta
Now I realize why the Adirondacks seemed so quiet: no jays! One reconnoiters the porch, pivoting in front of my chair with an odd screech.
Cold and clear. Stripes of sunlight don’t distinguish between the gold on the trees and the gold already on the ground: everything glows.
Coming back from the Adirondacks, I find a different mountain: much redder and yellower than it was a week ago, and much less mountainous.
[Gone camping in the Adirondacks. Back in five or six days.]
Thick fog. Silence punctuated by the muffled thuds of black walnuts landing on the lawn. The distant, mad cackle of a pileated woodpecker.
Cold drizzle. The burble of a song sparrow. A flycatcher of indeterminate species flutters up from the foxtail millet beside the stream.
A sudden commotion of geese. I run to scan the sky out of habit, as if they were migratory, and their “V” still a horn open to the north.
The sky begins to clear by late morning. I get up from my reading about the extinction of rare frogs and go out again to shiver in the sun.
Under a white sky, the trees rock and sway, showing the pale undersides of their leaves—a palms-up gesture of welcome or helplessness.
Brief shower from a blue sky; a rumble of thunder. Goldenrod by the woods’ edge is turning yellow for the second time with fallen leaves.
Two gray squirrels in their fall colors—snouts and bellies stained brown from walnut hulls—dash past each other on the rain-slick trunk.
Overcast and cool with jays, jays, jays. A red-tailed hawk’s pale breast flashing through the leaves, the sound of wingtips clipping limbs.
All the small birds converge on a birch tree to scold some hidden thing. It never stirs. They drift away. Sunlight settles on the leaves.